Analyzing and processing vast amounts of textual data presents significant challenges in efficiently extracting key information.In this paper, we introduce '***Spotlight***’, a novel paradigm for information extraction that produces concise, engaging narratives by highlighting the most compelling aspects of a document. Unlike highlights (fragmented key points) and traditional summaries, which prioritize comprehensive coverage, spotlights selectively emphasize intriguing content to foster deeper reader engagement with the source material. We formally differentiate spotlights from related constructs and support our analysis with a detailed benchmarking study using new datasets curated for this work. To generate high-quality spotlights, we propose a two-stage approach: fine-tuning a large language model on our benchmark data, followed by alignment via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that the resulting model not only identifies key elements with precision but also enhances readability and boosts the engagement value of the original document. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/ankan2/Spotlight-EMNLP2025.

In an ever-expanding world of domain-specific knowledge, the increasing complexity of consuming, and storing information necessitates the generation of summaries from large information repositories. However, every persona of a domain has different requirements of information and hence their summarization. For example, in the healthcare domain, a persona-based (such as Doctor, Nurse, Patient etc.) approach is imperative to deliver targeted medical information efficiently. Persona-based summarization of domain-specific information by humans is a high cognitive load task and is generally not preferred. The summaries generated by two different humans have high variability and do not scale in cost and subject matter expertise as domains and personas grow. Further, AI-generated summaries using generic Large Language Models (LLMs) may not necessarily offer satisfactory accuracy for different domains unless they have been specifically trained on domain-specific data and can also be very expensive to use in day-to-day operations. Our contribution in this paper is two-fold: 1) We present an approach to efficiently fine-tune a domain-specific small foundation LLM using a healthcare corpus and also show that we can effectively evaluate the summarization quality using AI-based critiquing. 2) We further show that AI-based critiquing has good concordance with Human-based critiquing of the summaries. Hence, such AI-based pipelines to generate domain-specific persona-based summaries can be easily scaled to other domains such as legal, enterprise documents, education etc. in a very efficient and cost-effective manner.